I believe most of us are familiar with the Worst Wizard ever thread, which was about figuring out what is the weakest wizard you can play in vanilla MoM.
This thread aims to do the same for CoM now that every major spell and racial update is done.
Once we manage to come up with a conclusion, playing that wizard will be a new version of the challenge, which I'll attempt myself, and ofc encourage others to do that as well.
My thoughts :
Race
None of the races are particularly bad in CoM but I believe Lizardmen is far the least suited for high difficulty games. While their fast growth is a decent advantage and their units even have good stats, the aggressive and reckless settling required for this race to function well is not viable on high difficulty where you are unlikely to be able to protect your territory or avoid wars.
Halflings would be my second choice, while they are a pretty great race as a whole, their lack of strong military for the entire game aside from slingers and magicians (which means major vulnerability to any Sorcery wizards) can be crippling on max difficulty. Still, they can be potentially good so I'm not so sure about this.
Barbarians, although they have severe building limitations, can most likely pull off a successful invasion in the early game with superior and faster military so they might not be the worst possible choice at all, but worth considering.
High Men, while a quire superior race, have a really bad early game with the additional unrest and no racial benefits until mid tier units, but they're definitely not bad enough for this challenge.
Klackons are one of the stronger races in the mod, High Elves were and still are top tier, Orcs are quite good, and Gnolls have a too strong early game without having most of the restrictions on barbarians.
Nomads however, while a good race on its own, can be pretty bad if the proper land options are chosen due to their no granary limitation : on Dry land I would assume they would be rather underperforming.
All of the Myrran races are awesome, so those are definitely not an option.
Books/Retorts
Runemaster, while a good retort, is expensive at 2 picks and contributes nothing unless you have high end spells that need to be protected from dispelling. Cheaper Arcane spells are useful, but not particularly good. Stronger dispelling, although powerful, at the highest difficulty level, not so much, enemy wizards will likely recast their dispelled enchantments way faster than usual.
Myrran sounds like an obvious choice if not playing the better races but it actually is not : Not having to compete for land against 3 other wizards in the early game is a major benefit....unless playing Barbarians, who strongly rely on finding enemy cities to conquer.
Sage Master is a good way to waste a pick, while researching faster is a good thing, doing so without having enough spell books to get spells that are worth it is ideal.
Charismatic, while it helps in diplomacy, on high enough difficulty merely helps AI wizards to develop even faster due to the player maintaining peace and not wasting their resources with wars. It's an especially bad pick for Barbarians, I would skip it for Lizardmen though who benefit greatly from not getting into early wars.
Cult Leader is perfect for Barbarians who cannot build the buildings that benefit from the ability, but probably should not be taken with Halfling.
Famous, while a good retort, without proper spells to keep heroes alive is not very useful and might be a good way to waste another pick.
Chaneller is another excellent retort to have, but it's more of a late game one, in the early game distance penalties are not harsh enough to really matter, and this costs 2 full picks. It's one of the stronger picks taken but other options would be even better so it has to be done. Also, Channeller is only as strong as the spells we can spend mana on, and we are going to make sure we don't have those at all.
Finally, taking 1 book of every realm means only common spells can be learned found or traded for -aside from one researchable uncommon per realm - and no spell is given at all at the beginning. However, since quite a few retorts are good with heroes, to deny access to healing and resurrection, I believe Life books should not be taken.
This leaves 1 pick to use which I would probably use on Artificier, which is not not cumulative with Runemaster and the spells can only be traded for commons so they have no value either.
Although Artificier+Famous+Charismatic is an excellent hero strategy, without Life magic to keep heroes safe and level them up, and lacking ways to get the resources to buy or create the items, they're still the weakest retort one can get.
So the 12 picks should be 1 of each book except Life, Runemaster, Famous + Charismatic or Cult Leader depending on race, Artificier, Chaneller, Sage Master
Land options
With Lizardmen, the my "worst" choice would be Huge land, poor minerals, and Dry climate : not only would it be impossible to take advantage of water walking, but the low population limits from deserts would disable the advantage of fast growth, and poor minerals would make sure those deserts do not contain ores to help either.
For halflings I would probably do Huge, rich and wet, the extra resources and generally more fertile lands would help computer players a lot, while quickly building a large number of Halfling towns does not hep much due to their weak and one-sided military.
For barbarians, Tiny land would hurt especially hard, as they'd be stuck conquering nothing for a long while, poor minerals and dry climate keeping them even more starved for resources.
Portrait
This depends on whether the game is played with optional portraits or not, but I believe the least threatening enemy wizard in the game is all Life, meaning Ariel or Reimu. Due to heavy influence of Life, they tend to get the least aggressive personalities and objectives, on top of lacking early summons.
Patchouli might also be a good candidate to take because playing her, the AI gets more common and fewer rare spells due to having all 5 realms, which is exactly the bad strategy this game will attempt to do. The original portraits do not have a wizard of this type however.
Sorcery+Death is particularly powerful in the mod so I would not want to take out Kali/Yukari.
This thread aims to do the same for CoM now that every major spell and racial update is done.
Once we manage to come up with a conclusion, playing that wizard will be a new version of the challenge, which I'll attempt myself, and ofc encourage others to do that as well.
My thoughts :
Race
None of the races are particularly bad in CoM but I believe Lizardmen is far the least suited for high difficulty games. While their fast growth is a decent advantage and their units even have good stats, the aggressive and reckless settling required for this race to function well is not viable on high difficulty where you are unlikely to be able to protect your territory or avoid wars.
Halflings would be my second choice, while they are a pretty great race as a whole, their lack of strong military for the entire game aside from slingers and magicians (which means major vulnerability to any Sorcery wizards) can be crippling on max difficulty. Still, they can be potentially good so I'm not so sure about this.
Barbarians, although they have severe building limitations, can most likely pull off a successful invasion in the early game with superior and faster military so they might not be the worst possible choice at all, but worth considering.
High Men, while a quire superior race, have a really bad early game with the additional unrest and no racial benefits until mid tier units, but they're definitely not bad enough for this challenge.
Klackons are one of the stronger races in the mod, High Elves were and still are top tier, Orcs are quite good, and Gnolls have a too strong early game without having most of the restrictions on barbarians.
Nomads however, while a good race on its own, can be pretty bad if the proper land options are chosen due to their no granary limitation : on Dry land I would assume they would be rather underperforming.
All of the Myrran races are awesome, so those are definitely not an option.
Books/Retorts
Runemaster, while a good retort, is expensive at 2 picks and contributes nothing unless you have high end spells that need to be protected from dispelling. Cheaper Arcane spells are useful, but not particularly good. Stronger dispelling, although powerful, at the highest difficulty level, not so much, enemy wizards will likely recast their dispelled enchantments way faster than usual.
Myrran sounds like an obvious choice if not playing the better races but it actually is not : Not having to compete for land against 3 other wizards in the early game is a major benefit....unless playing Barbarians, who strongly rely on finding enemy cities to conquer.
Sage Master is a good way to waste a pick, while researching faster is a good thing, doing so without having enough spell books to get spells that are worth it is ideal.
Charismatic, while it helps in diplomacy, on high enough difficulty merely helps AI wizards to develop even faster due to the player maintaining peace and not wasting their resources with wars. It's an especially bad pick for Barbarians, I would skip it for Lizardmen though who benefit greatly from not getting into early wars.
Cult Leader is perfect for Barbarians who cannot build the buildings that benefit from the ability, but probably should not be taken with Halfling.
Famous, while a good retort, without proper spells to keep heroes alive is not very useful and might be a good way to waste another pick.
Chaneller is another excellent retort to have, but it's more of a late game one, in the early game distance penalties are not harsh enough to really matter, and this costs 2 full picks. It's one of the stronger picks taken but other options would be even better so it has to be done. Also, Channeller is only as strong as the spells we can spend mana on, and we are going to make sure we don't have those at all.
Finally, taking 1 book of every realm means only common spells can be learned found or traded for -aside from one researchable uncommon per realm - and no spell is given at all at the beginning. However, since quite a few retorts are good with heroes, to deny access to healing and resurrection, I believe Life books should not be taken.
This leaves 1 pick to use which I would probably use on Artificier, which is not not cumulative with Runemaster and the spells can only be traded for commons so they have no value either.
Although Artificier+Famous+Charismatic is an excellent hero strategy, without Life magic to keep heroes safe and level them up, and lacking ways to get the resources to buy or create the items, they're still the weakest retort one can get.
So the 12 picks should be 1 of each book except Life, Runemaster, Famous + Charismatic or Cult Leader depending on race, Artificier, Chaneller, Sage Master
Land options
With Lizardmen, the my "worst" choice would be Huge land, poor minerals, and Dry climate : not only would it be impossible to take advantage of water walking, but the low population limits from deserts would disable the advantage of fast growth, and poor minerals would make sure those deserts do not contain ores to help either.
For halflings I would probably do Huge, rich and wet, the extra resources and generally more fertile lands would help computer players a lot, while quickly building a large number of Halfling towns does not hep much due to their weak and one-sided military.
For barbarians, Tiny land would hurt especially hard, as they'd be stuck conquering nothing for a long while, poor minerals and dry climate keeping them even more starved for resources.
Portrait
This depends on whether the game is played with optional portraits or not, but I believe the least threatening enemy wizard in the game is all Life, meaning Ariel or Reimu. Due to heavy influence of Life, they tend to get the least aggressive personalities and objectives, on top of lacking early summons.
Patchouli might also be a good candidate to take because playing her, the AI gets more common and fewer rare spells due to having all 5 realms, which is exactly the bad strategy this game will attempt to do. The original portraits do not have a wizard of this type however.
Sorcery+Death is particularly powerful in the mod so I would not want to take out Kali/Yukari.
